Mixed spirituality

My understanding of the other half of the buddha's teaching on absence of a creator god: there is no individual self. "We" are just the result of habitual reactions to our environment--sensory stimulus, conscious awareness, conditioned response of liking, disliking, or neutrality. We grasp, crave, and cling to keep stimuli we like, feel aversion towards stimuli we don't like. Buddha taught these reactions of craving and aversion are the source of our suffering--all is as it is. There is a time for compassionate intervention to correct ignorance, but it is nothing personal. No individual self, no immortal soul. When there are no more conditioned responses, only moral actions flowing from wisdom in the present moment, we are free of the bonds of our kamma and can then choose to dissolve the body-mind through physical death and mental liberation into nibbana (nirvana), or stay alive in this body and just hang out in bliss, or reach out and teach others like Gautama the Buddha did.

Raised Catholic in a predominantly Christian country (USA), ideas of no-self, no-soul, no-sin (only ignorance) feel revolutionary and are difficult to grasp. My tendency is to focus on the similarities--perhaps the imortal christian soul returning to God is the same experience as the illusory individual mind returning to the emptiness of Nibbana? Talking with friends and family back home, I've been reconsidering the truth in Jesus's teachings and the wisdom that may be available by reading the bible and (re?)developing a personal relationship with God/a higher power.

I was sitting on a plane yesterday--still such a surreal experience for me...journeys that once took days, months, or years are crossed in the span of hours! As we taxied out to the runway and I watched the ridiculous amount of air-traffic through LAX, I wondered about the impact of jet exhaust on the temparature of the atmosphere and global warming. I wonder if anyone is studying this, but not quite enough to do a library search yet or contact my atmospherics prof at UCSC...

anyway, I was sitting on the plane and praying for guidance to realize God's will in my life--a bit of an awkward process as I return from 9 months in Thailand trying to figure out what the Buddha was talking about and if no-God no-self feels true in my personal experience--but at the end of my little prayer, I bent down and looked at the floor under my airplane seat and found a 1" tall gold-colored pin of an angel carrying a small harp...Be an angel unto others. Sounds good to me for now.